Showing results for "mother tongue" in Literature & Fiction

Brynn is a claustrophobic suburban mother on the brink . . .Eric, her husband, is transforming in dark and dangerous ways . . .Their daughter, Jenny, can't fathom the storm coming her way . . .

A teenage mage of humble birth and slightly above-average skill, Zorian is attending his third year of education at Cyoria's magical academy. A driven and quiet young man, he is consumed by a desire to ensure his own future and free himself of the influence of his family, resenting the Kazinskis for favoring his brothers over him. Consequently, Zorian has no time for pointless distractions, much less other people's problems.

American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.

Abby Lamb has done it. She's found the Great Good in her husband, Ralph, and together they will start a family and put all the darkness in her childhood to rest. But then the Lambs move in with Ralph's mother, Laura, whose depression has made it impossible for her to live on her own. She's venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, who has a complicated understanding of motherhood given the way her own, now-estranged, mother raised her. When Laura takes her own life, her ghost starts to haunt Abby and Ralph in very different ways.

On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations....

In this playful and daring interrogation of language, the globally acclaimed Yoko Tawada reveals the poetics, politics and potential of existing outside one's mother tongue. From Senegalese writers discarding colonial-enforced French to the increasing use of loan words in her native Japanese, Tawada deconstructs the ways in which the world shapes and is shaped by languages: their hidden systems of power, their sweeping histories and, ultimately, the people who claim, reject, adapt or romanticise them.

Being a firefighter isn’t easy. Especially for a Black woman. Working with family helps a little. But when somebody from your company doesn’t come back from a call, it’s brutal—as in, “How’m I supposed to go on?” brutal. And one death took me to a really dark place. A year later, I’m at the Pirates’ hockey training facility. Just another day on the job. Until I find a charred journal. I look inside for the owner’s name, but the words on the page punch me in the gut. It’s like reading my own thoughts. Reliving my own pain.

After getting his Master's degree in the US, and because he can't get a job, and because all he wants to do all day is sit at his Play Station, Enrique Márquez Pino, a middleclass Bogotan, is forced to return to his home country, where he is to live with his father. Enrique believes that nothing is unattainable for a young, smart and hard-working Colombian (poor idiot). Nothing gets too nice for him in Bogotá, but at least he gets the chance to portray his countrymen and women.